Who is suitable for blastocyst culture?
This technique is suitable only for some patients, as it depends on the number and quality of a couple’s embryos seen in the laboratory each day. Many embryos do not continue developing for five days in the laboratory and our experience has shown that less than half of embryos are capable of development into blastocysts. Very occasionally none reach this stage. Thus in order to progress with blastocyst culture we assess embryos daily to see if there are at least 6 top quality embryos each day, and if not we carry out embryo replacement on day 2 or 3 as usual. Patients who do not have sufficient embryos for blastocyst culture are not at a disadvantage – the success rate for blastocyst culture and transfer is very similar to standard IVF.
